PODCAST| Matt Micucci interviews Sarah Adler and Roy Miller, actors of the film The Cakemaker.
Sarah Adler and Roy Miller star in The Cakemaker, directed by Ofir Raul Graizer. The film was screened at the 2nd International Film Festival & Awards Macao. Roy Miller plays Oren, a german man married to a woman in Israel, Anat, who engages in a romance with a dough maestro working in a cake shop in Berlin, whom he meets with regularly on his business trips to the German capital. Sarah Adler plays Anat. We never see the two of them share the screen together for, as Miller says in his description of the character, a film’s turning point is marked by his passing, which then connects the lives of his wife with his German lover. As explained in this interview, The Cakemaker was a film in which the actors had to connect and experiments with sides of themselves that had nothing to do with their private lives: Miller had to handle the challenge of portraying a tender and physical romance with another man despite himself being straight, while Adler tells us that she does not resemble her character in her private life at all and that it is what she goes through that she could understand. This in turn prompts the question of whether the fact of being taken out of your comfort zone in playing a role for the screen is a good thing because it allows you to experiment and explore parts of yourself you did not know existed. Adler also shares with us that she was approached by the director long before it was being made. The Cakemaker, in fact, as the director himself tells us in our interview with him, took eight long years to make, and Adler was initially approached years before it was finally shot.
The Cakemaker: Thomas, a young German baker who runs a popular pastry shop in Berlin, is having an affair with Oren, a married man from Israel who has frequent business visits to Germany. When Oren dies in a car crash in Israel, Thomas travels to Jerusalem seeking answers about his death. Disguising his relationship to Oren, Thomas infiltrates the life of his late lover’s widow Anat who owns a small café in the city and starts to work for her. As his traditional cakes and cookies bring the establishment to life, Thomas finds himself involved in Anat’s life in a far deeper way than he ever anticipated.
Alice Rohrwacher has been appointed President of the Caméra d’or Jury at Cannes 2025. Known for her poetic and visionary cinema, Rohrwacher will award the best first feature at the festival’s closing ceremony on May 24.